“Great ambience to display such wonderful art.”
MIES RIETVELDMies was born and bred in Rotterdam .She studied at the Academie Voor Beeldende Kunsten and took her degree in Fine Art and the History of Art. She worked for fifteen years in the education section of the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam before leaving to take up a teaching post in Art and Art History in Vlaardingen High School. Now retired she divides her time between Rotterdam and Ross on Wye. She works in most media – oil, watercolour, but now concentrates mostly on acrylics and mixed media. After years of living in the unrelenting flatness of the Dutch landscape with its low horizons and huge skies, Mies delights in the contrast of the Herefordshire and Welsh Borders landscape with its mixed crops of wheat and corn, linseed, rape seed and borage. She marvels at the warmth of its red earth and the backdrop of its rolling hills and soaring peaks. Her relationship with this new-found landscape is intense, and it continues to effect the direction of her work. She strives to achieve more than a mere visual reproduction of her subject. When working out in the open she seems to look for longer than she actually paints. She prefers to lay the foundations of a painting on the spot - but this is not done with bravura slashes of colour (that will come later), but with a considered analysis of shape and form and tone and atmosphere. When all this has been assimilated to her satisfaction she will work and rework areas finding a richness in foreground detail and perhaps a certain sense of mystery in the distant hills. She feels the warmth of the sun on the crops and is acutely aware of the transient shifts of clouded shadows. Her work is held in several private collections and she was particularly pleased when the Herefordshire Health Authority purchased one of her paintings to brighten up a wall in the hospital at Ross. |